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It's clear that since the Foo Fighters were Dave Grohl's upstart band in 1995 -- just after his role as drummer in Nirvana had folded -- the band has become huge arena headliners.

There are Grammy awards and nominations, platinum albums and fans worldwide. And on Friday, the normally four-piece band swelled to eight members on stage for some songs, including guitarist Pat Smear, a one-time member of Foo Fighters and touring member of Nirvana.

Through all that, though, the Foo Fighters, and especially Grohl, have not become pompous, righteous rock stars. In the show at the Reno Events Center, the band played a two-hour set that framed not only the fan favorites, but also the accessible, and at times very funny, frontman Grohl.

Although the band had cancelled shows earlier this week when Grohl was down with the flu, they came on stage strong. Opening with the new "Let it Die" gave the band a chance to find its footing with its hushed intro, building to the full-on fervor that ends in Grohl screaming. The band blasted through a few more songs, including "The Pretender," "Times Like These" and "Breakout."

Grohl sounded a little raspy coming off his illness, and he barely pulled off "Best of You" for the encore, but as he explained to the crowd: "We can cancel Arkansas, we can cancel Oklahoma, but there's no way we were going to cancel Reno."

That could have sounded like any concert cliche, but Grohl added "Just kidding, I totally wanted to cancel Reno."

It was one of many pauses in the music that night where Grohl stopped to deliver more than just a solid rock show. At one point he spotted a fan drumming on the barricade near the stage and climbed down near him to put a microphone on what Grohl called the barricade solo. The fan pounded away with one stick on the metal barrier while drummer Taylor Hawkins continued to play.

Sticking mostly to its catalog of louder songs over the years, including "Learn to Fly," "This is a Call," "Stacked Actors" and "Monkey Wrench" the band also turned a couple of songs, including "There Goes My Hero" and "Everlong" into acoustic numbers.

Nearly the whole band got a chance to solo, but they restrained themselves from going over the top. Grohl and guitarist Chris Shiflett squared off "Crossroads" style in a guitar duel, and Hawkins took a few minutes to pound furiously away on his Gretsch kit. There was even a triangle solo after Grohl ordered the guy on "bells and triangle and s--t" to come out from behind his wind chimes and do a solo. The crowd ate it up.

Following "All My Life" the band retreated back stage to make the crowd beg for an encore. In another display of Grohl's comic side, four video screens panned around the printed set list, marked "Reno, Feb. 1," scanning down to "All My Life," but not showing what remained. Soon after, Grohl's face popped up on the screen, taunting the crowd with the set list and calling, with hand signals, for more noise from the floor.

After the charade, the band returned with an encore of "Big Me," "Long Road to Ruin" and "Best of You."

During the show, Foos drummer Hawkins was given the mike for one song, and the crowd fell silent -- it just wasn't a great song. But the fact that Grohl, as a drummer, could emerge from his kit to become the frontman of a wildy successful rock band is testament to his talent, and the near-capacity crowd at Friday seemed to agree.